The Bible is by far the most influential text worldwide, but over the course of its’ history, many have attempted to add to its’ canon and redirect the orthodox doctrine of its’ people; and while most have failed, it’s sad to say that some have been successful in misguiding a small sum of these supposed followers to follow their own doctrines and canons. Among those led astray are the Mormons with their own additional book: The Book of Mormon. And so, in order to come to a greater understanding of their misunderstandings, I studied this Book of Mormon to allow for me to join in on productive conversations with any Mormons I might come in contact with. While studying the text, I made sure to do the best I could to constantly remind myself of the literary and historical background of the supposed “translator” of the text, as well as the actual biblical background from which it claims to relate to. While there were many more differences, I still found a couple of similarities which I hope to explore in this essay.

While I had expected to read a great variety of narratives with discourse and poetry, I found that the text lacked any narrative and that the only discourse was found within the dialogue. However, in favor of the Book of Mormon, there did happen to be some minimal amount of poetry within the Book of Mormon that happened to be formatted wrongly so that it might not be known that it was poetry. Then again, even this poetry was only from long passages of the Bible that were poetic added into the text of the Book of Mormon (2 Nephi 12-24; Isaiah 2-14). Even with the continuous formatting for prose throughout, there was still no rhetorical device or reason to believe any other passages were poetic.

Besides the lack of poetic devices and intricate or even intelligent design, the Book of Mormon lacked the textual ambiguities that make the Bible what it is. Instead of leaving doctrines like election and baptism ambiguous and unexplained as the Bible does (See Romans 8-11; Malachi 1:2-3; 2 Peter 1:10; also Matthew 3:11; John 3:5; Acts 1:5; 2:41; 8:12; 19:4; 22:16; 1 Peter 3:21), the Book of Mormon goes out of its own way to explicitly mention such doctrines and practices and the exact way in which each should be performed (2 Nephi 11:21-38; 31; Moroni 8:9-21; and 2 Nephi 2:27; Alma 30:7-11; Helaman 14:28-31; etc.). This is fact is interesting not only on its own but even more so in the context of all of the street preachers that would have been fiercely debating all of these major doctrines in the day of Joseph Smith.

This brings up another interesting point of contention with the Book of Mormon: biblical references. The Book of Mormon is claimed to have been translated “by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit” from an unknown language into English with the primary source which is taken back up into Heaven shortly afterward.. There is no evidence of the existence of this text other than The Testimony of Three Witnesses and The Testimony of Eight Witnesses which preface the contemporary Book of Mormon. From this arise many different contentions: the fact that many words appear in this translation from a language that is supposedly a mix of Egyptian and Hebrew (Mormon 9:32) which don’t have roots in either of those languages or any languages like them - Some examples being: “crucifixion” (2 Nephi 6:9; from Greek), “hell” (1 Nephi 15:35; 2 Nephi 2:15; Germanic), “baptism” (1 Nephi 19:1; 2 Nephi 9:23; Greek), and “Christ” (2 Nephi 10:7; which is the Greek word for the Hebrew “Messiah”). The usage of such words comes across as suspicious to any readers aware of the linguistic context and origins claimed of the Book of Mormon and of the time of Joseph Smith’s claimed translation of it.

This leads to the other interesting fact about the book: the biblical citations. The Book of Mormon also contains an entire section of one of its books (2 Nephi 17-24) taking from the biblical book of Isaiah. What is more interesting, is how the entire claimed translation is identical to that of the KJV translation of the Masoretic Text to the point where it even contains all of the translation errors of the time. It would seem that the translation of Isaiah’s writings from Hebrew into the claimed Egyptian-Hebrew hybrid language and then into English would surely seem to have some differences from the standard translation of Hebrew into English (just as the Septuagint and Targums would have differed even when translated into English from the original Hebrew). However, with no copies of the original Book of Mormon manuscript around today, there is no way to confirm any of these.

All in all, from literary make-up to major modes of communication, to linguistic origins to inter-textual citations, the Bible and Book of Mormon are vastly different bodies of literature that hardly have anything in common. The Book of Mormon lacks all the genre variety, subtle ambiguities, literary genius, and citation methods that distinguish the Bible from other literature.